If this test event is about markers, signposts and confidence-boosting on the road to London, then Great Britain's team sprinters Victoria Pendleton and Jess Varnish and their team pursuit counterparts Laura Trott, Dani King and Jo Rowsell have set off in the grandest style possible. There can be no better way to begin the countdown to the home Games than with world records and gold medals.

For Pendleton and Varnish, the first Great Britain gold medallists at the Olympic velodrome, this evening could well come to hold greater significance as the night they put the Australian ghost to rest. Anna Meares and Kaarle McCulloch may bounce back in their home world championships in early April but at worst the British duo will head for London with honours even after taking their scalps on Friday night in a performance which Pendleton said left her "pinching herself" to see if it was more than a mere dream.

There were hints of what might come in qualifying early in the afternoon when Varnish posted a personal best for the standing lap to launch Pendleton to her fastest time for the second lap since before Beijing. That enabled the pair to break the 33sec barrier for the first time, a massive psychological boost.

That probably led them to gamble with upping their gear ratio for the final against Meares and McCulloch, who had responded in qualifying by breaking the world record. Even after that the British camp felt the Australians were within reach and in the final Varnish went faster again. The 21-year-old from Bromsgrove's start is critical: the higher the speed she delivers Pendleton at, the faster the Olympic champion will go: in the final the older woman managed to break 14sec, her fastest ever.

That all produced a time of 32.754sec and left Pendleton as ecstatic as might be expected with her old nemeses trailing behind. "We were pleased this morning and I can't explain how happy we are. We just wanted to squeeze a little more out, so we experimented with different gears. We thought 'why not?' as we were going to get silver even in the worst case. We've laid down a marker for ourselves: doing a time like that is fantastic for the confidence."

Also exuding confidence on Friday night were Rowsell, Trott and King, who were keen to remind onlookers that they are a four-woman team with Wendy Houvenaghel, who was replaced after qualifying by King. They were in a different position from Pendleton and Varnish, who have been chasing their great rivals for a while whereas the pursuiters are defending world champions with the opposition on their heels.

The trio started more steadily than in qualifying and led the Canadian quartet to the finish, with Trott looking particularly strong, something which bodes well for her tilt at the omnium over the weekend. The world record had already fallen to Australia as they raced to the bronze medal but, Rowsell said, they had been posting times inside the old record in training and were confident that, if they could come out of the blocks in more restrained style, it would be theirs.

Their time of 3min 18.148sec takes almost 1.5sec off the previous best and that in turn makes it likely that by August the intense competition between the British and the rest will push it close to or through the 3min 15sec mark as Houvenaghel has predicted. "Yesterday Jo came out as if she was doing a 500 metres sprint," said Trott, "so today we were steadier in the first four laps, then controlled it." But the point of a rehearsal, as Rowsell underlined, is to get such miscalculation out of the way now.

The crowd had a third British medal to cheer – and inside the Pringle that means a wave of noise so deafening that the public address is drowned out – when the men's team sprint trio of Ross Edgar, Jason Kenny and Sir Chris Hoy raced to bronze behind the Germans and French. Compared with the fireworks ignited by the women's teams that seemed almost anticlimactic but, unlike those squads, this is a work in progress and that work may well continue almost until the start gun goes in August.

The trio are within reach of the best and, according to Hoy, were faster than they have been since 2009. "Solid bordering on pleasing" was the summary of the triple Beijing gold medallist but they have not resolved the man one issue yet. Edgar needs to go faster and Matt Crampton is waiting in the wings if Kenny takes his place.